“Oh, yes, all is well with me,” he said. “I have been sorry to leave you so much alone in the north.... Yes,” he added, “it was harder for you than for me—the test that day on the tennis court. You were brave, my friend. I knew all was well—when the instant passed and you remained silent.”
“How do you mean—all was well?”
“I knew that the message of India would get to America—since you did not spoil it by defending me.”
Nagar turned to Miss Claes, adding:
“I saw the fury and fright rise in his eyes, and all the impulses of ethics of the West—then silence over all. It was as if we were cemented——”
Dicky remembered that last word afterward.
As he moved about and talked, he was vaguely conscious of watching the other two together. It was as if Pidge would want to hear of every gesture and detail. Miss Claes was less Indian here than in Harrow Street. There he had thought of her as belonging to the East; here she seemed of the West. Something of the composure he had noted on the tennis court had come to stay in Nagar’s eyes. As moments passed, Dicky knew that they contained deep vitalities of meaning that would appear in coming days.
It was as if his limitations were being stretched, but by consummate hands. There was repeatedly brought to him, from them, something that he refused to hear or dwell with: that he had done well, that he was deeply approved of in their sight; that there was much more to take place between them as a group, even though they were to stay in Asia, and he was leaving for The States.... Then all faces turned, and in the doorway stood the Little Man.
No one spoke, but to Richard Cobden it was one moment of his life that he thought of as religious. Mahatma-ji came in between them, and Dicky felt the old urge somehow to help with his hands; the sense, too, of all India thronging, whispering around them. For a moment the four had been standing in silence, when they heard the sweep of bare slow feet in the hall, and now an old dark face was in the doorway, a smile serene as nothing else on earth but the Hills themselves—a dark wrinkled old face, and she came forward and stood very low and little in the midst of them—Gandhi’s comrade.